Victory: A ranking system for what makes a social game into a blockbuster

victory 2Alok Kejriwal, chief executive of Indian game firm Games2Win, shared a couple of interesting charts with me that describe a way to rank social games by benchmarking how they stack up in a variety of important features such as the quality of the game play, the virality of a game, which makes it spread faster, how original it is, whether it has international appeal, and how addictive or habit forming the game is.

Kejriwal’s own internal game creators set up the ranking system, which they dub Victory, and ranked some of the world’s most popular social games using the system. The top chart shows the rankings of games such as Zynga’s FarmVille, and the other chart explains the ranking system itself. It adds some interesting perspective on what the top games share in common. If you’re making social games, you might want to be sure that your game rates high on these measures, which are undoubtedly subjective but still useful.
victory 1

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.